Girls of the Resistance Miriam R. Kramer In July books become a necessary accompaniment on vacation, whether you’re headed for the ocean, a pool, or a cabin in the woods. If you have a teenager traveling with you, you want to keep them reading during summer vacation with an intriguing piece of young adult fiction. Two recent books offer compelling stories of young women navigating the difficulties and horrors of World War II in Germany and Holland. Orphan Monster Spy by Matt Killeen and Girl in the Blue Coat by Monica Hesse are exciting choices for keeping your adolescent learning not only about Europe in World War II, but also how to navigate the unpredictability of life itself. In Orphan Monster Spy, Sarah, a Jewish girl, struggles her way out of a car after her mother is shot at a roadblock on their trip out of occupied Austria to neutral Switzerland. Running from Nazis with dogs, she escapes only to bump into a British spy pretending to be a German at an abandoned factory. When he takes her on as his pretend niece, obtaining papers for her, she decides to go back with him to Berlin and help fight those who have taken over her country. With Sarah’s gymnastic training, acting skills, powers of observation, and desire for revenge, she plays the part of Ursula Haller, the niece to a respected German named Helmut Haller, who is in reality the British spy Captain Jeremy Floyd. Floyd is on a mission to destroy the equivalent of a nuclear bomb. He needs Sarah to infiltrate a Nazi girls’ boarding school to become friends with the daughter of the scientist building it. When Sarah agrees to take on this challenge, she puts herself in a situation where obedience to the state is key….
By Sarah Becker ©2017 Born in 1917—100 years ago—President John F. Kennedy (D-MA) died in his prime. On November 22, 1963 an assassin shot Kennedy dead. He died of a wound in the brain caused by a rifle bullet. Kennedy was the fourth U.S. President to succumb to such wounds. For Kennedy, the past was prologue. It included wealth: he received a $1 million trust fund from his father in 1938. Also education: Kennedy studied at the London School of Economics in 1935, and graduated cum laude from Harvard University in 1940. His first book, While England Slept, was published in 1940 at age 23. He took his first political step in 1946. Kennedy represented Massachusetts 11th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1947 to 1953, elected to the US Senate in 1952, and passed over as a Vice Presidential nominee in 1956. On August 24, 1960 candidate Kennedy launched the southern leg of his Presidential campaign from Alexandria, Virginia. The Alexandria Gazette reported: “With presidential candidate Kennedy in the fore…politicos…will stage what promises to be the largest political rally ever held in the city of Alexandria. The rally sponsors…hope that spacious George Washington High School stadium, which seats 14,000 persons, will be jam-packed to a standing room only condition.” “The affair will launch the Democrats’ national campaign in the south…The oratory, to which all else was a prelude, indicated the issues which will be most stressed…these bore down on the experience of [his opponent] Richard M. Nixon, the matter of foreign policy and the Communist threat. It avoided the grating problems of [a divided] political party…the [Democrat] Party platform on civil rights and sociological issues.” Virginia Dixiecrats “deplored the Democratic Party’s reckless disregard for constitutionality; principles in the Civil Rights Plank and inflationary Federal spending.” “The…